With weeks of new things being shown, we'd like to dial back to some balance changes we're planning to make to improve the game in 0.11.0 First, let us remind you that we'll be unlocking tier 7 units and sub-units in the development tree and their unlocking materials will be dropped from later waves in challenges and latest missions. We expect them to provide tons of power to the player and we'll keep watch to modify them if any of them are game breaking.

Now, for a more specific balance change, we aim to increase the power of tanky tech sub-units in the coming update. We'd improve them in 0.10.0 and while they are well received, their power is too low to be competing for a sub-unit slot. In 0.11.0, we're increasing their power by a significant amount.

Units that improve shield regeneration cooldown are mostly buffed by around 50%. Think nodes that currently lower time before shields start regenerating by 25%, all of them will be changed to a 40% reduction, allowing players to easily slot in one of two for constant shields regeneration. This should make them more dependable and more competitive for a slot in any build that rely on the regenerating shields.

On the same note, we'll also be improving sub-units that straight up improve shields regeneration and regenerate shields through other means. Things like Perpetual Generator will proc more frequently. Arms S. Battery will recover more shields. Things like that.

And lastly for this goal, we're also improving durability tech sub-units that are overshadowed by their peers, such as Metals Replacement and recovery nodes such as both the Nanorobotics variant.

What do you think about these tentative changes? We'd like to discuss about it so if you have any opinions on what we've listed, we're more than glad to hear from you through our discord, linked below. See you next time!

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Welcome back to another WIP post, this week introducing a new Bullet Shooter that is on another spectrum of shooters. Please welcome the Pile Bunker!



PIle Bunker is a MELEE Bullet Shooter, having one chargeable bullet, you. This is a weapon that took a long time to get it to work, being vastly different from other shooters, requiring us weeks to design, craft, and finding solutions for what we wanted with it. What you're seeing is the final design of Pile Bunker, a weapon that launches you into enemies.



The Pile Bunker can be charged for higher distance, piercing enemies, and a really high extra damage multiplier. It will damage any enemies within its path and players can instantly dash to cancel out of the end part.



While this might sound like a really good melee weapon that allow players to move through the battlefield quickly and uses Piercing to calculate damage instead, Pile Bunker will need to reload after every usage. No amount of MAG.Load will be able to increase its ammo amount.



Well then, why don't we make it a melee weapon instead? Well, the design philosophy of melee weapons is to have combo attacks and a single-attack weapon wouldn't fit well within that category. In our minds, we also think that Pile Bunkers would thematically fit better with shooters, being a weapon that winds up, pierce, and launches a steel needle into enemies and retracting them on reload.



Wait, that design we just mentioned was different than what we're showing right? It doesn't drag enemies along the trajectory and burst damage out at the end at all? You are correct in your observation. We tried staying as true to the name as possible at first but with our enemies design that doesn't allow some of them to be dragged along, that design was not able to feel good. Thus, we tinkered it in a way that allows Pile Bunker to just pierce through upon charging, and strike quickly when not charged.



With this design, players can also canonically think of it as other piercing blade, piercing lance, or anything that fits their design. This gif above shows how we've attached accessories onto the needle part and we can't wait to see how you all utilize and create something from it!

We hope you like it! See you next time!



Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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Welcome back to another weekly WIP update. It's a short one this week, featuring some weapon parts of the upcoming new shooter PRISM. We designed these things to look like they're particle accelerators or energy charging machineries but we'll also throw in the simple parts for you all to freely customize it as well.

We'll be back next week to show more!



Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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Welcome back to another WIP update. This week features one of the short perpetuals update we've been working on since ages ago, regarding Quark's models and aesthetics. These Quarks were one of the special uncommon Quarks that does not conform to the normal behaviors and uses special moves to effect combat. We haven't used much of them as they were causing frustrations for players and we've shifted them away, even to an extent of removing them from the game in most missions.



In 0.11.0, with the constant improvements we're doing here and there with the game, we'll be bringing them back with an updated model and possibly updated powers as an improvement to the old ones.



We wanted these uncommon/special ones to be able to spawn in most missions and provide a challenge more than the normal behavior of running into players or drop dead, but we'll also try to remove any frustrations from them like the old area shield they used. We hope we'll be able to make them a fun experience for everyone. Until next time!



Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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Continuing a streak of showing exciting stuffs, this week is about the up and coming, new Energy Shooter we've designed as something fun. An energy shooter we call PRISM. First, take a look at this image.



That doesn't look exciting at all though. What are you cooking, Vermillion Digital? Well, take a look at this next clip of PRISM.



Prism has a secondary firing acquired by holding down "left click" for around a second to charge up. It deals no damage at all, but attaches a prism onto every lockable points within an area. This means every enemy that can be locked by homing missiles are susceptible attachment points of this secondary fire. What does it do? Well... let's have this next clip explain it as it's worth more than a thousand words.



The PRISM's primary fire will chain to each and every PRISM that's attached on an enemy. Every shot is counted towards a threshold and when the threshold reaches a certain point, the PRISM explodes for another instance of damage. Stacking explosions here can be extremely strong to clear out groups of enemies if you can setup the perfect chain.



Now, this makes it feel that PRISM will only be good against groups of enemies... but that's not the case at all. Remember we mentioned that PRISMs can be attached to every lockable points? Yeah... with bosses having multiple lockable points, PRISMs are significantly effective against bosses. A charged shot aimed carefully can create multiple PRISMs onto a boss and every primary fire will now hit each and every of those PRISMs.



We're still fine tuning their numbers like attachment range, chain range, chain count, etc. We wanted it to be usable and not clunky in any situation but also not too overpowered that it overwhelms other currently overpowered weapons and be viewed as the only good weapon out there. We'll leave it here for this week. See you again soon!



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With last week's Bullet Shooter's Single fire showing off, it is necessary we also show its twin, the Energy Shooter's Single fire charged shot as well.



We went a different angle for the Energy Shooter's charged shot. With Bullet Shooter being the fast, penetrating bullet, energy shots are bigger, slower, and explode upon impact. This is a fiery ball of death, a charged-up buster shot, and an impending doom for its victims in our imagination. We wanted to make the effect much more extravagant at first, but the visual clutter was too much thus we have the toned-down version here.



While the effect might not show, the full explosion range is significantly larger than an uncharged shot. You can see in the first image that these goes further beyond in comparison, and just like the bullet shooters charged damage, this one also does ramp its damage to absurd numbers after fully charged. . We're excited to see how you'll use the charged shot later when the update drops, and how you'll customize your weapons to match the explosions.



We hope you liked it! See you again soon!

Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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Last week we mentioned reworking some of our old weapons, right? Here's the first of those reworks, single bullet shooters. They are now able to charge up for a few seconds to fire an empowered shot. Let's talk about their concepts first.



Railguns is a shooter we've been requested since the first patches of M.A.S.S. Builder, and we have always wanted to add it into the game. However, there's a wide variety of railguns in imagination, those with extremely huge stationary firing rails, those with a handheld version that uses some sort of electric rail channeling energy from somewhere. There're even ones that uses speed up plasma energy on rails instead of traditional bullets. In M.A.S.S. Builder, our shooters does not represent weapons, but concepts... so we stripped those ideas into the core concepts of railguns in our understanding, a chargeable weapon that fires an extremely accelerated bullet.



And that's what we added to the Bullet Shooter's Single firing method. Players can charge up their shooters for a few seconds, raising its damage multiplier significantly much more, even higher than they could do in those few seconds, and release an extremely accelerated and fire bullet. We will not coin this thing a railgun, because we know that you can imagine more with it and not locked to the name.





We hope you liked it. More will be coming soon.

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Welcome to the first 0.11.0 WIP update! We're starting where we left off in our "What's Next" this week with the improvements towards controls and input mappings. Moving forward, players will now be able to map their inputs to two-buttons-press for controllers. That might not sound exciting, but it allows us to create some new functionality without caring for the "not enough buttons on a controller" problem.

This means... hold down attack for charging? Yes, we're reworking some of our old weapons to accommodate charged firing, and we're looking to make some new weapons that will be different and fun to use. We'll show them when they're ready, soon!



Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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First of all, before anything else, we must announce that we're shifting our development engine to Unreal Engine 5 for the next version. Now now, we must ask that you don't panic and assume the game is going into a development hell of reworking on each and every part of the game. That won't happen. We've tested it internally and it's something feasible and also what we've wanted to do for a while now.

So, let's talk about it technically. An engine shift sounds like something extremely large, and we do agree it's something of a huge hurdle to do so. However, the methods we've used to work on M.A.S.S. Builder made the whole project quite modular and we've always been updating our engines and plugins to their newest version. Shifting our project from UE4 to UE5 actually requires minimal effort. Minimal enough that we've tested working and playing the game successfully internally even before 0.10.0 was released, and it eventually became a reason why we released 0.10.0 in that state.

We are aware you might be worried about the specifications and downsides of using UE5 to develop M.A.S.S. Builder. Will the game now require the highest end of PCs to play? Absolutely not, because we aren't using those features of UE5 at all. We consider game engines as toolbox with various tools suited to developing a game, and even when changing hammers, screwdrivers, wooden planks, and any other thing, the house called M.A.S.S. Builder is still M.A.S.S. Builder, and we ask of you to trust us in this decision. We promise you here that we're not using any technology that requires a better hardware from the current version.

Then why are we using UE5? First, we wanted to upgrade the development Framework and Technology available to the latest version which allows us to work on the various features we wanted to implement for a while now as well as improving the game's quality as a whole. There are various features that have been on hold since forever, some of which we'll list below, which could be achieved through this upgrade. This will also allow us to improve our own efficacy and lessen the time required to develop the game. Updates won't be as stretched as 10 months like the last two updates in the future. The things required to develop the game would be streamlined through the engine itself after this shift without us requiring any third-party tools or us working on the editor/engine for weeks to be able to do certain things like before.

Again, we ask you trust us on this decision. Now let's look at what are the features and contents we're adding into 0.11.0 after this engine shift.

• Improvement to control settings and combat as a whole.
  In 0.11.0, we will be adding controller schema updates, allowing players to bind key hold + button to perform an action. Old players might know that since forever ago, the reason so many things cannot happen in our game is due to us not having enough buttons on a controller to perform actions, and creating a system to support it takes a while to do so. In 0.11.0, this will be available and a lot of QoL as well as new things will be added on this new basis.
  
  
• Shooters, improvements and additions.
  One of the most awaited shooter improvements are charging shooters. We'll be going over the old shooters and see which one we can add a charging mechanic to it, and also look further to add new shooter types to the game. It's one of the things we have heard players wanted for a while and we're researching which ones we can add into the game to create a new, unique shooter type where players can use to fulfill their imagination of certain weapons of their design.
  
  
• Melee combat improvement and stance additions.
  Aside from new shooter types, we're also adding new melee weapon stances. There are a few weapon stances we wanted to add into the game. Data miners might have known a few since ages ago, but aside from those, there are also various requested melee stances we also wanted to add. Also, the melee combat improvement plan is still being worked on and update 0.11.0 with the engine shift allows us to adjust them to a point we wanted it to be. Things like sliding, missing attacks, and other unsatisfactory movements will be improved upon in the coming update.
  
  
• New story missions.
  We're adding 3 new story missions and will end our story there. We mentioned how we've the story with filler missions in the Afterwords and after deliberate discussion among ourselves, we've decided to stop having those and focus on completing the story missions up to the final piece of the game. This will allow us to fully work on more polishing, QoL improvements, customization contents, and multiplayer in full in 0.12.0 next year. This will also allow us to fully rescale our enemies to a better status line.
  
  
• Tier 7 unlocked.
  With the completion of the story, we'll unlock Tier 7 units and sub-units in 0.11.0. We've planned Tier 7 to be used in the last few missions but since we're ending our story in 0.11.0 as well as rescaling enemies, unlocking tier 7 units is a must.
  
  
• More customization contents.
  And as always, as we're the BUILD game, we'll add more customization content.

We thank you for your support up to this point, it's been years of development and you're still here, and we promise to deliver a better M.A.S.S. Builder in update 0.11.0. Again, if there are things, you'd like to discuss with us, suggest to us, or any concerns, feel free to talk with our developers in our discord. Stay tuned for more!

Discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
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First, before anything else, let us provide you all with the final patch notes before we move on from update 0.10.0 to prepare for the "What's Next" for M.A.S.S. Builder next week.

0.10.4 Bug fixes

• Significantly reduce enemies HP and shields in later stages especially on M.A.S.S. enemies.
  
• Multiplayer mode [Normal] missions has significantly lower multipliers. It's still recommended for 4 players but will be much easier than before.
  
• Fixed various bugs regarding customization parts
  
• Fixed a small discrepancy in lock-on tracking. Still, it's a soft-lock system and players may still miss their shots especially weapons with small bullets.
  
• Fixed some parts providing more stats than intended
  
• Fixed a ton of collision bug in the new volcanic area missions
  
• Fixed profiles showing wrong chapters in selection page
  
• Fixed damage showing in the wrong spot in some missions against some enemies
  
• Fixed players able to get stuck within a crystal in the new mission

With those out of the way, let us first say, hello everyone. It's us, the Vermillion Digital team, once again with our post-patch message. Thank you for another year of your interest in our game, even though it's still an unfinished dream that we'll continue working on. At this point, the game is almost ready to be called version 1.0.0 right? There's a patch or two of campaign missions left, and few features here, a few additions there... that shouldn't take more than the end of next year right? And then we can start working on all the other fun stuffs like other legs... oh wow it's so far away... but fret not we're here to stay working on it, being committed to our dream.

So! Once again, many of you must have the question, why did it took almost a year for a patch to be done again? Honestly, there's too many things to fix and many things we wanted to do, as well as a shift mid-development and heated discussions with you supporters to change many of the things we showed during our WIP (and we're grateful for that, since it bettered the game during the time we can still change things around easily).

One of the main things that took time to work on was new missions. We wanted something new, something that looked different than before, and something that fits the game. Creating these new missions was a task managed by two of our team members, designing the levels, designing the newer Quarks, and designing the mechanics of each mission itself. You might've seen the new type of in-game cutscene in one of the later missions that moved away from a total cut to a smoother transition as well. Those took time, and then after missions, they went on to made new Quarks, new animations, new attacks, new parts, new everything content related. Such is a pain of a small team and we wasted no time working on everything to a point where we think it's enough of an update to be released.

Now let's look at the update reception (at least, our understanding of the reception so bear with us here). 0.10.0 was not a satisfying update. We know, we understand there's a lot to be desired from M.A.S.S. Builder and maybe leaving it in the oven for a few more months could do the trick. We'd like to say it can't. We released 0.10.0 in this state, as there are some of the things that needed to happen which we'll talk next week during the "What's Next" but for 0.10.0 we deem this is where we should stop and release the update. It's still the things we promised you with, a lot of missions, fixes here and there, many of the requested features and parts made it in, to a point where we think this is good enough, not what we wanted for the best, but good enough.

What's not to the point we wanted things to be? Let's see. How about melee combat?

Melee combat received its major update, a bump into attack speed, and that's something we thought was good. It honestly plays much better and its well received by most of you guys trying it out and playing around with something newly added. Still, it's not in a most-desired state yet. We wanted more, we wanted it to flow better. There are things like going too far with the combo, missing hits when crossing with a Quark and "sliding" attacks that looked weird. Those will require something much more and we have a plan for them in the coming days.

Ranged combat also received some number adjustments, AUTO was reworked and it's said to be a better choice for single target now, being able to forego stamina damage towards just pure damage through aiming. That's good in itself, but leaves something else that we can't do this update, more shooting methods. That's something to be expected to come next update, we'll talk about it next week.

See, we've planned the game to last around 22 missions, shifted it to 24, and now it's... 26? 27? Around that number, but we haven't rescaled our enemy stat's growth back. Tier 6 was meant to be used for ending the game and tier 7 was a victory lap tuning. Stretch the mission counts out and now Tier 6 isn't going to be powerful for the final missions. That's something we understand made players feel like enemies became too much of a spongy HP tank than ever. We'll acknowledge it's a problem here.

One last thing before we end this Afterwords, feel free to suggest anything. We'll read it but won't respond as it'll turn into a back and forth of demand and not compromise between us and you. Unless of course if you'd like to discuss things with us, we'll have someone to take the feedback to our team and discuss it with you in our discord.

Until next time!

- Vermillion Digital Team